You are here

Road Trip

A road trip a great way to discover the world. Stop travelling to destinations, but enjoy travel itself. Leave the highways and take smaller, slower but much interesting and scenic routes. This site’s purpose is to help you chose. Chose a starting point and chose a destination, the experience in between is all up to you and your car.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung identified the road trip as a "persistent element of human culture." Deep inside we want to be on the move, exploring places where we never heard of and discovering other cultures.

Whether you want to explore the Sahara desert, admire Italian Renaissance buildings or see the eternal snow in the high mountains, there is always a road to get you there. Discover these journeys in our road trip database.

Road in Tuscany, Italy

Road tripping

Road tripping is a fast growing hobby, and not just a means of going on vacation. There are groups dedicated to the art of the road trip, known either as professional road trippers or road enthusiasts.

Road trips are enjoyed all over the world. Although the history of road trips may be different in each country, the idea, concept, and methods remain relatively unchanged worldwide. For this reason, it can be fairly easy to conduct a road trip on foreign soils. Unlike some other methods of travel, cars allow travelers to customize their trip and set their own pace.

Road trip facts

The total length of all roads in the world is 68,937,575km (42,835,823 miles). If you would like to travel all these roads at highway speeds (100km/h or 60mi/h) it would still take 79 years to do so.

The Semo La mountain pass (el. 5,565 m/18,258 ft) is the highest vehicle-accessible pass in the world. It is situated in the central part of Tibet and gives access to the Chang Tang region. The road crossing the pass is an unpaved track travelled only by a weekly bus and trucks heading west to avoid the boggy parts of the south of the country.

The Israeli highway 90 is the lowest road in the world. Running along the western bank of the Dead Sea, it’s located at −423 m (−1,388 ft) below sea level.

Baldwin Street in a suburban part of New Zealand's southern city of Dunedin, is considered the world's steepest residential street. Rising from 30 m (98 ft) above sea level at its junction with North Road to 100 m (330 ft) above sea level at the top, the street has a maximum slope of 35%. For every 2.86 meters travelled horizontally, the elevation rises by 1 meter.

Car parked at Baldwin street

The Pan-American Highway is recognized as the longest continuous road, spanning 29,800 miles from Prudhoe Bay in North Alaska right across Canada, the U.S., Central and South America – all the way to Ushuaia on the southern tip of Argentina. Driving it will take you through just about every climate the world has to offer.

The world's first recorded long distance road trip by automobile took place in Germany in August 1888 when Bertha Benz, the wife of Karl Benz, the inventor of the first patented motor car, travelled from Mannheim to Pforzheim (a distance of 60 miles or 106 km) in the third experimental Benz motor car and back.

The 1908 New York to Paris Race was the longest distance motor race in history. It took 169 days before the winner crossed the finish line, the second team finished 26 days later. The race was driven at a time where paved roads were still rare, and in large parts of the world there was no road at all.